In a market of three and a half people, another debate on quotas for Russian wine.

In short:
The Ministry of Industry and Trade is promoting a bill on a minimum share of Russian wine in retail and public catering at 20% of the total number of wine varieties sold from March 1, 2027.

From the perspective of the vast majority of retailers, all or almost all are already meeting this quota.
From the perspective of HoReCa, it's much more complicated.
If a wine list consists of 500 SKUs, finding 100 decent Russian wine SKUs is a bit of a problem, and ensuring they are always in stock is a double problem.
And getting them ordered—I won't even comment.

As a result, the situation may end with HoReCa actively sourcing wines that were previously only available in retail, leading to price increases (estimated at around 10%).
By the way, last year HoReCa accounted for 3.75% of the wine market (96.25% was retail).

I personally have several questions and potential issues:

1. I'm sitting here, meeting the quota (already now), and suddenly there are shortfalls in Russian wine supply (and that has happened, all sorts of things happen), the share of Russian wine on the shelf drops within five days to "below 20%", and it's physically and logistically impossible to find a decent replacement that quickly. Who is to blame?
Or can I just stretch the display of Russian wine across the shelf and that's enough? (but the law refers to "the total number of varieties").

2. Friday evening, in a store in the city center, customers have bought up the not-so-expensive Russian wines, retail staff haven't had time to restock the shelves (Friday is a very busy day), the share drops to "below 20%", who is to blame?

If any potential "shelf overseers" are reading this, please don't take this post as an instruction for action, and if anything, understand and forgive in advance.

3. Will this lead to a decline in the quality of the Russian shelf in retail? Sooner or later, buyers will face a shortage and start putting anything on the shelf just to meet the quota (for show).

Often in posts supporting this law, I see the argument: "Well, for a wine country, this is a normal law, what's there to discuss?"
Russia is not the most wine-oriented country; our per capita consumption is three times lower than in Romania or Norway, or 2.5 times lower than in Iceland. Yes, there are many of us and we drink, but in terms of per household consumption, things are bad.
And that's without considering the quality indicator of what is consumed.

And here's a homemade meme for everyone's feed.